-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of Lanny Marcus Sent: Monday, August 20, 2007 7:49 AM To: CentOS Mailing List Subject: [CentOS] OT: Suggestions for database for physicians patientrecords?
This is very OT. If list readers can point me in the right direction, to other mailing lists, or web sites for recommended databases, that will be much appreciated!
My wife's doctor wants to move records, for approximately 6000 patients (over a 12 year period), from paper (18th century) to a database (20th century). The data entry will be a PITA, for his secretaries, regardless of what software he goes with. I did some reading about MySQL, and I also did some googling for Linux+database and there are many other databases out there. One requirement is that one field be variable length (patient history: surgeries, treatments, etc.), which I suspect might vary from 200 words to 3000 words. That field size needs to be very flexible. If there are "front ends" that will make it easier for his secretaries to input patient records to the database and access it, that will be a "plus". It would also be a plus, but, it's not mandatory, if they can do this in Spanish. It's a small office (2 surgeons, nurses and secretaries) so I suspect there might be 4 to 6 workstations connected to the database server, maximum. I would like to help him get the best possible solution. Something with a large user base, excellent documentation and an active ML, like CentOS, is the goal. Thanks much! Lanny
There are numerous systems out there, but what I would look for is more on a document management system then specifically a database.
If it were myself doing this I would look at some way to take a scan of a medical record into PDF with an OCR that will create a PDF text overlay so it can be indexed into a database and become fully searchable.
I saw an OCR engine for Linux, a port of a popular commercial OCR engine, I think it was distributed by Vividata called OCR Shop XTR, it's command-line driven and is designed for working with large batches at once, I think it is around $5K. Combine that with a photocopier that scans into PDFs and dumps it to a samba share which feeds it into the software and after a tuning period you can crank those 6K files into PDFs that can be fully imported into just about any document management system out there.
-Ross
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